Works

Stilleben mit Holzfigur, 1911

Still Life with Wooden Figure

Oil on canvas

77 x 65 cm

Acquired in 1912 for the Museum Folkwang, Hagen, since 1922 Essen, confiscated in 1937, re-acquired in 1993 with the support of the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Stiftung Kunst und Kultur des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Eugen-und-Agnes-von-Waldthausen-Platzhoff-Museums-Stiftung

CommentaryLike many other artists of his generation, including Matisse, Picasso and Kirchner, Emil Nolde was also fascinated by non-European, so-called primitive cultures. In 1910 he began to study intensively the collection of the Berlin museum of anthropology: »The piled-up remains of a disappearing early cultures interests me.« (Emil Nolde) Numerous studies and sketches demonstrate his occupation with foreign masks, figures and fetishes. ›Still Life with Wooden Figure‹, was made using a male statuette as model, probably from Zaire; it is the first painting in a series of similar canvases. Nolde confronts objects from everyday life, simple, seemingly archaic clay pots and an indefinable flower with this African statue fascinating in its strangeness and simple beauty.Karl Ernst Osthaus, who began collecting African and Oceanic art very early on and who was the first the exhibit them together with works of European art, acquired this painting just a year after it was finished (1912) and later added to his collection other of the artist’s paintings inspired by African masks. As part of the Osthaus collection, the painting came to the Essen Museum Folkwang in 1922. In 1937, the National Socialists declared it »decadent« and confiscated it.

Obj_AccNote_S (Erwerb): Acquired in 1912 for the Museum Folkwang, Hagen, since 1922 Essen, confiscated in 1937, re-acquired in 1993 with the support of the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Stiftung Kunst und Kultur des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the Eugen-und-Agnes-von-Waldthausen-Platzhoff-Museums-Stiftung